Category Archives: Words

Commuting stuff

Posted on by
Reply

Commuting from Westchester was a strange experience. Beyond the amount of time it took (an hour and ten minutes, door to door) what usually bothered me most was the bizarre relationship I formed with the people who rode in the same car from the same station at the same time — which is to say the utter lack of relationship. I’ve covered this before, I realize.

I guess it’s common commuter code, but I didn’t know: Apparently you don’t acknowledge the people who stand near you while you wait for the train. One woman smiled every morning, but the seven or eight others I saw every single weekday mustered hardly a glance when I showed up to the spot between the elevator and the stairway where we all always stood.

And then you see the same people on the weekend at Home Depot and they still act like they don’t know who you are! And I’m all, hey buddy, you are literally the first person I see every day that I’m not married to, we can at least nod for the sake of humanity? Yeah, I realize it’d be weird for us to establish any sort of nodding relationship because then we’d have to nod every time we saw each other and that could grow to be a burden, but isn’t this anonymity also a bear?

Apparently not.

Anyway, Mike Malone is the dude that says hello. A Mets fan and fellow Hawthorne commuter, Mike recognized me from the Kiner’s Korner Revisited videos, introduced himself, and interviewed me for his commuting blog at Trainjotting.com.

Mike’s got a new book out, The New York Commuter’s Glossary. It’s a book of clever words and phrases for concepts all too common to daily commuters, among them: iClod, Crapathetic, Latrainian Tomlinson.

If you commute regularly and you liked Sniglets when you were younger — as I did and as Mike acknowledges he did in the end notes — you should enjoy having a standardized set of definitions for the things that have always bothered you or humored you on the train and subway. It’s hardly dictionary length, but the glossary and illustrations by Joseph Walden should be enough to keep you entertained for a couple of commutes and provide a handy reference thereafter. So check that out.

My recent commutes, I should mention, have been far more pleasant. I’ve been riding my bike from the Upper East Side to Midtown, mostly traveling south down 5th Avenue along the park. I get here in 15 minutes, and I ride past all sorts of awesome buildings in the fresh air with the Empire State Building looming in the distance. It’s awesome. I’m the schmo in the office with chain grease on his pants all the time but whatever. It’s not like I like pants.

Revenge is a dish best served using Little Leaguers as waiters

Posted on by
1

The Long Island youth-baseball manager arrested for allegedly stalking an opposing coach shelled out more than $50,000 to personally finance a revenge team that fell flat on its face, The Post has learned.

Angered after his own son failed to flourish on the Long Island Infernos traveling baseball team for 10- and 11-year-olds, Robert Sanfilippo used his own money to create and fund the Long Island Vengeance to even the score against his boy’s former squad, a law-enforcement source said….

While other Long Island teams had modest equipment, Sanfilippo spent like a Suffolk County Steinbrenner. The Vengeance sported top of the line helmets with airbrushed skull and crossbones insignias that cost upwards of $300 each for a team of roughly 20 kids. The squad also provided each player with two uniforms and baseball bags worth hundreds of dollars.

– Selim Algar, N.Y. Post.

Oh man, Robert Sanfilippo hates subtlety. The Long Island Vengeance! Sounds like a wrestling move and/or a drink special at a Park Ave. bar in Rockville Centre.

Also, outside of the whole playing for an alleged stalker thing, it doesn’t sound like such a bad deal for the other members of the Long Island Vengeance. They get awesome gear and a chance to play in this league, and all they have to do is help Sanfilippo enact his bizarre Little League retribution.

I wonder what he would have done if they beat the Infernos, anyway. Would Sanfilippo just drop it? Would that be the end of the Vengeance? “OK, boys, our work here is done. Pack up those bags. Oh, and I’m going to need those bats back.”

Probably it wouldn’t shake out like that because it almost never does with (alleged) psychotic vendettas.

The skull and crossbones logos, it turns out, are awesome. Not in any way appropriate for 10- and 11-year-olds, but awesome. From the Vengeance’s website:

Badass, right?

Via James K.

Dear guy

Posted on by
Reply

Dear guy,

On behalf of all of us sitting in the rows behind you, I’d like to thank you for your antics throughout the 8:15 p.m. showing of Dredd 3D at the AMC Orpheum on Sunday evening. Were it not for your persistent, exaggerated outbursts to demonstrate otherwise, I might have thought that the movie was pretty cool and that you were not cool. Thankfully, though, you came through, and now I know that you, guy, are so much cooler than Dredd 3D.

For example: Without you sitting in front of me, I probably would have enjoyed Paul Leonard-Morgan’s thumping industrial score and maybe even considered it an inspired accompaniment to the futuristic urban hellscape in which the action in Dredd 3D takes place. And I definitely would have thought it pretty neat when, in the trippy computer-graphics driven sequences meant to depict characters’ torpid narcotic experiences, the music slowed to a heavy, spacey brood. But luckily, you were there in front of me, wildly mimicking cliched techno dance moves in both tempos. That was hilarious. Your friends seemed really impressed.

And while some of the dialogue did seem rather predictable, perhaps even simplistic in its bluntness, if you were not sitting in front of me, guy, I might have assumed that had something to do with the fact that the movie was adapted from a comic book, and that the lines that came off as kind of funny were intentionally kind of funny. But your affected, condescending giggles throughout assured me that the directors and screenwriters intended every line in Dredd 3D to be received without any shred of irony and that you, guy, could have written them so much better.

Guy, if you just sat there quietly watching the movie like the rest of us, I might have forgotten that I — like you — shelled out $15 for high-minded fare ripe for mockery if it failed, not some stupid action movie I picked because my wife had to go to bed at 9 p.m. and I wasn’t tired and it was the next thing playing nearby. Certainly we should all have high standards when entering the follow-up to Judge Dredd, a movie that managed to present both Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider at their most irritating.

But guy, your snickering witticisms and your attention-grabbing gesticulations, from the way you took it upon yourself to simulate various 3-D images with your hands as they were happening to the way you reenacted many of the film’s gory slow-motion death scenes immediately after they occurred on screen even though they were plenty engaging on their own the first time, helped remind me that I didn’t just pay $15 to watch Dredd 3D. I paid $15 to watch Dredd 3D and some a-hole in front of me with skinny jeans and a Buddy Holly haircut demonstrating to the world that for whatever reason he was really ashamed to be at Dredd 3D and so needed to remind everyone every few minutes that he was cooler than Dredd 3D, which he undoubtedly was. It was f—ing great, guy. You rule.

Thanks,
Ted

So the replacement refs are not good. What now?

Posted on by
Reply

The scab NFL refs, you might have noticed, are awful at officiating football games. This leads to some awful football events like those that occurred at the end of last night’s Seahawks-Packers game, awful calls at a seemingly higher rate than they came last year, and an awful lurching pace to games as the fill-in guys run around trying to figure out what happens next.

Speaking of: If you’ve determined that the NFL’s replacement refs suck to the point that they are impacting the quality of NFL football — as they obviously did last night — what recourse do you have, as a football fan, to encourage the NFL and its officials to squash the beef?

That’s not rhetorical, really.

The best I can think of is for everyone to stop watching NFL football until its settled. But since the NFL has a monopoly on professional football and professional football is a juggernaut, that doesn’t seem likely to happen. Maybe we’re all just going to abide the scab refs until they improve or are replaced by better scab refs because we just can’t get enough football.

A more palatable but certainly less effective alternative is for everyone to whine and moan about it so much that the public-relations hit forces the league to flinch. That’s sort of what this post is about. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than this to do that. The NFL mints money off a bloodsport that we plan our weeks around and tune our flatscreens to every Sunday, Monday and Thursday like we’re the brainwashed populous of some dystopian future. The NFL is Big Brother and we have always been at war with the NFL Referees Association. Or something. The NFL can take its knocks without breaking.

The players present a wild card in the process. Clearly the replacement officials jeopardize player safety, and the players taking a unified stand against the league’s position could help the process along. But while the NFLPA is sympathetic to the refs’ cause, it insists there’s nothing it can do beyond writing strongly worded letters as “they’re not permitted to strike under any terms other than the security of their union.”

But if they’re claiming that the league “failed in [its] obligation to provide as safe a working environment as possible,” isn’t that a pretty legit gripe? Some football players die from the long-term effects of the head injuries they suffer. The NFL will make more than $9 billion in revenue this year off football players playing football. Who really holds the cards? No one wants to see Roger Goodell play football, right? No one wants to see Jerry Jones in a three-point stance across the line of scrimmage from Jim Irsay, at least not for more than a quarter.

What if in all the 1 o’clock games this Sunday, the players called the coin toss, returned to their sidelines, then just stayed there for a few extra minutes to remind everyone who actually does the football playing in football? No macho b.s., just a group of men who risk their health for their jobs so that they can make some money (and some other guys can make way, way more money) standing up for themselves to demand the safest possible incredibly dangerous workplace? Would anyone blame them for that? Would the league really sue?

Sandwich of the Week

Posted on by
2

This was supposed to come this weekend, but this weekend came first. That happens sometimes. I had two hits in baseball but struck out in a big spot in the ninth. Totally unclutch. Still reeling.

The sandwich: Adobo torta from the Mexico Blvd truck, which was parked on 48th St. between 6th and 7th in Manhattan on Friday.

The construction: Pork loin “marinated for 24 hours in [their] great grandmother’s adobo,” sour cream, lettuce, tomato, jalapenos, onion and avocado.

A sign on the counter said, “Ask for XXX Spicy,” but I’m never sure if that means deliciously spicy or oh holy hell I asked the Thai place for extra spicy and now they’re obviously punishing me for it spicy. So I sort of mumbled “spicy,” after I ordered and didn’t say “XXX Spicy.” So I don’t know if this was the spicy or regular version. It came with chips and a small plastic container of hot sauce, which I used.

Important background information: I thought I had a nice little window of time carved out to purchase this sandwich, bring it back to the office, photograph it, eat it, then get down to the studio in time for the 1 o’clock thing I had to do there. But then– oh man, this story is going to be really boring. Work!

Point is, I wound up having to eat the thing in something of a hurry on a crowded bench bordering a fountain in Midtown. It was a blustery day and I was trying to secure as much personal space as possible and keep myself reasonably tidy. So I had to politely position myself between fellow bench-bound lunchers, carefully arrange the bag the sandwich came in under one leg and some napkins under the other so they didn’t blow away, then rest the carton on my lap on top of a bunch more napkins to protect my pants from what looked to be a not-insignificant portion of that adobo sauce.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Within five minutes, the people to my immediate left and right have both finished lunch and left the bench, and a group of twenty-something business-casual types are hovering over me, obviously hoping I will scoot down the bench to make room for their full party as any reasonable and decent human being should in that situation.

I am going nowhere. My fists are full of amazing torta, and adobo sauce is dripping down my arms and splattered over my pants. The bag I took so much care to secure is adrift in the fountain, sailing north in the fall breeze. I felt it come loose when I leaned forward to prevent the sauce from spilling on the crotch area of my pants once the spillage was clearly inevitable, but the torta was way, way too good to worry about littering.

About that: Man, oh man. It tastes like what I imagine my Mexican great-grandmother’s cooking would taste like if I were Mexican and knew my great-grandmother. The flavor of the adobo — this is hard to describe — it’s almost cozy, something that makes you feel warm from the inside, not because it’s warm (which it is) but because it’s, well, warming. It makes me feel like I am being hugged by pork, and that’s the best feeling. Does that make any sense? I think it might have to do with cinnamon, but I’m not even certain there’s cinnamon in there.

Oh, and the pork loin — in a layer of thick hunks — is so tender it bites like a cheesesteak or something. Texturally, it makes for a nice contrast with the crispy the lettuce and the creamy avocado. There’s tomato and sour cream on there — Adobo Torta Supreme? — but they don’t factor into the flavor as much as you’d guess as the adobo’s pretty powerful, and if you add some of the hot sauce there’s a healthy kick, I suspect from habaneros but don’t quote me.

The bread’s soft and delicious too. It’s not quite enough to contain the sauce, sour cream and meat, but I’m not sure anything would be. This is an amazing sandwich, but you’re probably going to want to invest in a plate, or use a table, or eat it on laundry day. Or do what I do and just stop caring about getting sauce on your pants. It’s great. So liberating!

At one point, when the younguns in their trousers started straight-up staring at me, I’m pretty sure I actually snarled at them. I am nearly certain I had sauce dripping down my chin while I did it, and they looked rather disturbed and soon sought bench-space elsewhere. Good. Every man for himself out here. See that pile of napkins, dripping with adobo and sour cream, cascading off my pants and onto the bench around me? That’s the flag of my people, bro. My territory.

What it’s worth: I think eight bucks, plus the cost of laundry.

How it rates: 92 out of 100. Hall of Fame.

Is anyone really ready for some football?

Posted on by
Reply

In April, with the help of SNY promos man Brett, I published to YouTube a video of myself singing lyrics I “wrote” to the tune of a Bizet aria. Those lyrics are as follows:

Small sample size, small sample sample size
Small sample size
Small sample size
Small, small sample size, small sample size
Small sample size, sample size!
It’s a small sample size
Small sample size
It’s a small sample size.

There’s nothing worse than explaining a joke, but the song is nominally about baseball. Its premise is that baseball, like many pursuits, is subject to a hell of a lot of randomness, that our eyes and hearts are gullible, and that the fluctuations in performance from teams and players over small parts of seasons that lure us into believing they indicate something meaningful almost always prove otherwise with more evidence. And if you were to tell me that some baseball player I believed to be very good sucked very hard for 16 baseball games — or vice versa — I would certainly sing to you these words:

Small sample size, small sample sample size
Small sample size
Small sample size…

Etc.

So it seems strange to me that the sample-size specter is so infrequently cited in football, a sport that operates in tiny samples and that is, due to the money culture surrounding it, subject to such thorough scouring and forecasting from every barking pregame analyst and bright-eyed online gambler and sniveling office fantasy guru and everyone in between.

Why should we spare the NFL’s players and prognosticators the prudence we know is required in baseball? Is the game any less subject to randomness? Maybe, but then individual player performances are far more dependent on those of their teammates and opponents, and, in many cases, the officiating. We can see when a player consistently performs well in a system and with a certain set of players around him, but can we ever know for certain he is a great player that will perform as well in another system with other or lesser players around him?

And it strikes me that for a player to establish as much, he must be playing frequently enough to deny the opportunities to his replacements, so it is impossible to know for sure that any run-of-the-mill NFL-caliber player at the position couldn’t step in to the role and, with enough reps, enjoy similar success. Plus, it seems that given the short arcs upon which NFL players necessarily exist, by the time a player can establish beyond all doubt that he is excellent, that may very well no longer be the case.

We strongly suspect Peyton Manning is good. We know he played extraordinarily well for more than a decade as the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, and based on what we’ve seen from other quarterbacks and from — in brief spurts — Manning’s replacements, we believe few others would have performed as well as Manning in the same situation.

But does anyone think Peyton Manning circa 2004 would have played like Peyton Manning circa 2004 were he under center for the New York Jets this week and last? And does no one imagine Mark Sanchez — the suddenly gun-shy, inaccurate, altogether not-poised Sanchez — could look a bit better than he has recently (football-wise, at least) if the players around him were as good as the players around Manning back then?

And Peyton Manning is the outlier. Manning’s is the first name that comes to mind to counter any argument suggesting NFL players are more or less fungible products of their systems because Manning is one of the very few dudes who presented ample evidence over plenty of time that he was in fact something more. Manning’s the guy who started 208 straight games. The sample size seems adequate.

Sanchez? We don’t know. Sanchez has started 50 games, sure, but nearly half of them were also started by Wayne Hunter. He has at times been hampered by poor play calling, an awful running game, and receivers that look like they’d drop hand-offs and appeal to the refs for pass interference.

Which is all to note my growing concern that most purported NFL expertise is rooted either in sheer obliviousness or some sort of wink-nod agreement that no one really knows a damned thing about who’s better than whom, and we’re all pretty much full of it but we’re going to keep blustering forward because a) everybody’s watching football anyway, b) it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and c) there’s no actual accountability beyond 50 bucks to the office fantasy guru when our bold predictions go awry.

When I first watched Sanchez play quarterback for the Jets, I identified what I believed to be precocious and intangible presence and judgment at the position, and thought that he would prove great with time. Those qualities faded that season but returned in the playoffs, and then again in the first half of 2010. Now, he looks timid in the pocket, afraid to throw downfield but also afraid of oncoming rushers and afraid to tuck and run. But I know this represents merely a six-game stretch of mostly lousy play for the man, that he has played even worse in the past and recovered, that he’s cast into the spotlight — for better or worse — because of his position, and that, again, he’s getting little help from his supporting cast.

I want Mark Sanchez to be good and I’m not sure he is. I think he has looked worse than he actually is these last two weeks because of some poor play around him, but I am pretty certain he is not as good as vintage Peyton Manning. And I fear none of it will matter all that much as it pertains to this season if the Jets are forced to carry on without Darrelle Revis, whom I can say confidently is almost inexplicably awesome despite all the requisite caveats for his environment, sample size and confirmation bias.

Friday Q&A, pt. 2: Food stuff and randos

Posted on by
Reply

https://twitter.com/bagelsNrahtz/status/249156919854501888

When I started this blog, TedQuarters.com belonged to a weatherman who never actually updated the weather on his site. At some point, my dad — who owns a bunch of domain names for his own work — set some sort of flag on it to let him know if it ever became available, then scooped it up when it did. Now Pops is playing hardball.

I kid. He’d be happy to turn it over to me, I’m sure, but all the back-end stuff is already set up on TedQuarters.net, so TedQuarters.com is just a placeholder redirect page. There’s an easy way to set it up so it just points here automatically without having to load the page again, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m super professional, fellas.

More importantly, if you haven’t yet visited TedQuarters.org, I suggest you do so now. It’s my favorite of the TedQuarterses: Simple but effective. If that domain ever becomes available, I’m going to purchase it and maintain it exactly as it is now, in Smilin’ Ted’s .50-caliber honor. Next time I’m in North Georgia I want to get together with this dude and blow some stuff up.

https://twitter.com/IanBinMD/status/249142646050795521

None. I don’t like sugary beverages. I’ll splash some lemonade in unsweetened iced tea, but that’s about as much sugar as I ever take in drink form. Notable exception: Slurpees, but those count more in the dessert category than the beverage category to me.

Side note: A 7-11 just opened up around the corner from my apartment in Manhattan. Apparently this is 7-11’s new thing; they’re not just for the suburbs anymore. I haven’t been to many of the urban locations, but this particular one is like a boiled-down version of a 7-11. It’s basically just a coffee area, a soda fountain, a Slurpee thing, a refrigerator full of drinks, and a huge hot-dog-roller machine spinning all sorts of hilarious 7-11 specialties. None of the random groceries, cans of motor oil and magazines you find at the more spacious suburban 7-11s.

I used to always say that my life’s goal was to have one of those hot-dog-roller things in my home, but then I realized that if it weren’t manned, the hot dogs would get pretty gross. I think my actual goal is to have a fully operational 7-11 inside my home.

Someday.

https://twitter.com/KevinTracey1/status/249142147624861696

Wait, why do I only have 33 seconds to live? That sucks.

I actually love hypotheticals like this one, but it’s always funny that we answer them as though we’d be thinking rationally if we knew we had 33 seconds to live. Also, in this case, as though we’d want to spend any portion of our last 33 seconds texting someone and not, you know, trying to savor the waning moments of our existence.

Most likely, if I were making sense, I’d want to text someone I’d trust to relay a message and say, “Hey I’m dying and for some reason I can’t contact my family, please tell them I love them and that I’m at peace.” Then I’d probably add, “this sux dude peace out lol!”

But if I were dying in some particularly silly way that I knew all my friends would get a kick out of much later, I might fire off a text to the Twitter shortcode, all like, “Oh, Carlos Beltran has really done it this time.”

Alternately, I might text my friend Ripps with the very same words he long ago guessed would be his last: “I should have had more cake.” This would make me chuckle a bit before dying and maybe make him laugh a little bit too as we both waxed nostalgic for our younger days when we would sit around talking about dying and cake.

Or maybe I’d send a different friend the very specific list of people upon whom I planned to enact revenge but never got a chance to, hoping he’d be inspired enough by my death to carry it all out for me and not just sort of shrug and be like, “Ted died? That sucks.”

https://twitter.com/richmacleod/status/249141449126461441

I think Rich is joking, but multiple people have asked stuff like this lately. I haven’t. Does it seem that way? I didn’t write anything Wednesday because I was having a crappy day.

This is awesome, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes I just don’t have anything to say, and I don’t want to force anything out just for the sake of it (not any more than I already do, at least). I don’t know what the typical output is like for bloggers, but given the range of subject matter here and the nature of my actual work responsibilities, I feel like I’m pretty productive.

https://twitter.com/ouijum/status/249140479726329857

You’ll get no judgments out of me. Actually, that sounds pretty delicious.

Track back any “authentic” food and you find some cultural exchange somewhere and practically everything is a bastardization of some earlier thing. Maybe the restaurant where you ate that sandwich becomes incredibly popular, pulled pork on Texas toast becomes the new standard, and in 100 years we start judging people when they serve pulled pork on baguettes. Then we realize that too is delicious, and the cycle repeats itself. It’s the circle of pork, or something.

The only thing I feel certain should not happen in any setting is mayo on a sandwich with fresh mozzarella. I’m sorry but the mozzarella means too much to me. We’re better than that, people.

 

The black unicorn explained

Posted on by
Reply

Asked in training camp about his speed downfield, Bennett described himself to reporters as a “black unicorn.” Predictably, the name stuck.

Many assumed the label was just another example of Bennett’s eccentricity. In truth, fictitious animals are a staple for Bennett and his wife. The black unicorn is a character in Bennett’s novel — which also includes talking walls and a plot that Bennett will describe only as amazing — while Siggi, originally from California, has a healthy affection for mermaids. This year, Bennett even had a birthday cake made for his wife that featured a likeness of her, complete with a mermaid’s green tail, atop the icing.

Bennett’s den contains a collection of other unusual beings — he recently ordered a Mickey Mouse toy wearing a gas mask.

– Sam Borden, N.Y. Times.

Ahhh… every single thing about Martellus Bennett. Please go read this article.

Via Josh.

Friday Q&A, pt. 1: Mets stuff

Posted on by
Reply

First, an email from Evan:

I put together a comparison of the Phillies’ and Mets’ records in the first and second halves from ’07 up to this year. It’s crazy.  The Phillies have collectively been 14 over for the first half and 55 over for the 2nd half. The Mets have been only a half game worse than the Phils in that time over the first half of the year but an incredible 79 games worse than them in the second half.  How is it possible that one team can so consistently turn it on in the second half while another team consistently sputters out?  Earlier in the season, I had hoped that even if the Mets weren’t going to contend this year, at least they’d finish 3rd above the Marlins and Phillies, maybe flirt with a wild card.  But just like they have done for the last 5 years, and even though they traded some players away and their old stars are even older and coming off of injuries, the Phillies still made that push and now are in the mix for a wild card while the Mets have once again been left behind.  I have noticed you often chalk things up that are difficult to explain otherwise to the randomness of the game, but can results like this be considered random? The Phillies performed significantly better in the second half each of the last 6 years and the Mets performed significantly worse every year except for ’08. Maybe I’m just like a lot of fans and tired of Septembers that feel like this and watching a Phillies team that I thought was buried a couple months ago come in and do what they just did makes me frustrated enough to stay up until 2 a.m. doing dumb stuff like this. Ugh.

It’s a great question. I have to go with randomness because I’ve got nothing better, and because randomness has a powerful way of looking like all sorts of other things. David Wright is the only active player on the current Mets who was around for the second half of 2007. They’ve got a whole new coaching staff and a new front office. So unless Wright’s presence is so poisonous that it dooms the team in the second half (but notably not the first half) every single year, I can’t think of what it could be about the Mets as an organization that makes the team play worse after the All-Star Break. The Wilpons are a constant across that time period too, someone will certainly mention. But could a team’s ownership possibly have to do with its first half/second half splits?

Not for nothing, but there are some arbitrary endpoints in play: The 2005 and 2006 Mets were a bit better in the second half than they were in the first half. But the 2004 Mets also fell apart after the break, and the Phillies have been better in the second half in every season since 2003. I just want to hear a compelling explanation for it before I believe it’s a real thing. Something in the water? The toll of NYC nightlife over the course of a season? The way they train? After a game like last night’s I’m shattered enough to believe something, but not just anything.

https://twitter.com/Devon2012/status/249139828283805696

This came up in the comments-section yesterday: If Mets prospects lists still include Harvey this offseason, I imagine you’ll see at least a few that still put Wheeler ahead of Harvey. And that seems silly to me. I know Harvey’s Major League success has come across only 59 1/3 innings, but they were about as convincing as 59 1/3 innings could reasonably be. I remember reading on a generally reasonable baseball message board during the 2005 season a discussion over whether David Wright — with about a full year of All-Star caliber play on his Major League resume — had surpassed Andy Marte as a prospect. So, yeah. That. We already know Matt Harvey can be good in the Majors. We don’t know that he will be forever, but we’ve seen that he can be. Wheeler still needs to prove himself at Triple-A.

At this point, I don’t think it’s reasonable to hope Wheeler looks better than Harvey did in his first turn around the big leagues. I think the best you could hope is that Wheeler is as good as Harvey was, which would be awesome.

https://twitter.com/BlueChill1123/status/249139923813277697

Not even Dickey and Wright, I’d say. I’d prefer the Mets sign Wright to an extension because I doubt the type of players they’d return in a deal for Wright would turn out as good as him, but obviously they should always listen.

https://twitter.com/jenconnic/status/249140067870846976

I’m with you. It’s tough to defend them while they’re playing like they have been, and especially after soul-shaking loss like last night’s. But where’s the indication that the process is wrong? They’re losing. Many of the players aren’t very good and now many of them aren’t playing well. That is not surprising. Many of them are young, somewhat promising and under team control for a while. They’ve got depth and some youth in their starting rotation — probably, all told, the toughest commodity to maintain in baseball — for the first time in a long time.

They need more good players, no doubt. They need more payroll flexibility with which to acquire more good players, too. The team on the field, as currently constructed, is not a good one. Don’t get me wrong about that. But I don’t think there’s much to indicate that the front office’s plan is a flawed one and that things will be getting worse. We’ll see what happens this offseason. I imagine we all feel a bit sunnier about their prospects come March, as we always do.

https://twitter.com/tpgMets/status/249159078352400385

Man, I got a body for business and a head for sin. Abstract concepts I can handle but when it comes to execution or practice of business stuff, either my head hurts, I get angry, or I just giggle and yell out, “TAXI!” like in this Kids in the Hall sketch.

So I don’t really know why, when no one’s paying to be at the stadium, they don’t just open up the doors and say alright, fill it up, go buy Shake Shack and hot dogs and make the players feel good about themselves. But I suspect there’s good math behind it. I guess it would anger the season-ticket holders, but then, you know, really? Say you paid for a flight to New Orleans and there was an empty seat next to you on the plane, and the flight attendant came over and said, “Hey, this old woman who wrote us a letter absolutely loves po’ boys but she can’t afford a flight to Louisiana; we’re going to let her fly for free if you’re willing to give up part of that armrest and some legroom.” Would you not let her sit there just because you paid for the ticket?